How can AFCB be at their best for 90 minutes?

Eddie Howe gets a bit frustrated that AFCB don't always manage to put the performance in that lasts the whole 90 minutes. It is tough to keep the possession game going for the entire match and to keep the decision making good when having so much possession. But AFCB are causing teams to be wary of their style of play as once the team does get some momentum they are hard to stop. Nottingham Forest found that our to their cost when they looked to block rather than commit players forward and against Bolton Wanderers AFCB had a significant amount of possession that on that day did not lead to quite as many clear chances as perhaps Eddie Howe would have hoped for.

Working the opposition's goalkeeper has come up a lot on post match discussions with AFCB. While the team has scored a good number of goals in recent weeks they have struggled against the top teams to score more than a goal and that may be down to the opposition defending better or our players not quite being able to create as many chances against these teams. Against Forest there were lots of opportunities but there were fewer against Leicester and when it came to Bolton I was surprised that their keeper had a fairly quiet game.

While keeping the players fairly similar each game it just might be the time for Eddie Howe to start experimenting a bit more with so many players coming back to fitness. As well as Matt Ritchie coming back it will be great to see some familiar faces like Wes Fogden, Mohamed Coulibaly and Josh McQuiod looking to get on the pitch. A few fresh faces should give training sessions a bit more energy and I would like to think that Eddie and Jason will freshen things up if they feel the team needs to rediscover its cutting-edge.  In a way we need to be a bit more nasty when given opportunities in front of goal. 

Last season we had that in Brett Pitman who only need to be given a glimmer of hope to be able to score. Now the players are having to work harder to create opportunities and I keep hearing Eddie Howe say, "we were not at our best for the whole match." In this league that is the difference between getting three points or nothing at all. So I am sure AFCB are working on being at their best for whole matches.